Back in the late eighties and into the nineties I’d tried sending letters to people involved in the film, the cast, crew, production company and so on, asking them about it. Asking if they’d be prepared to be interviewed about The Corn Mother. I don’t know what my aim was. I just wanted more definite proof that it had existed I suppose and I’d thought about putting together a fanzine about it.
That was another big empty zero. Mind you it was hard back then to find the addresses of film people and then to know if they read the letters that were sent to them. Often I’d just send them to, say, their agent’s address and hope for the best.
To a degree the internet has changed that but less than you might think. Some industry people have their own website with a contact email or form but you never really know if they’re picking up any message you send or if somebody else runs their site for them. Anybody of any stature generally has layer after layer of agents and so on to guard them from, well, random people like me who want to know about some obscure film that they worked on more than a quarter of a century ago.
And then there are the rumours. Rumours that nobody really wants to talk about the film after they weren’t paid properly, that they’d rather just forget about it and even whispers that there are legal gagging orders in place to stop them discussing it.
Which of course is catnip to my quest. There’s nothing like a good bit of unknowable and unprovable backstory myth around a film to help nurture its cult status.
